For weeks on end I wake up at six in the evening, a jackhammer pounding incessantly in my
brain and mascara smeared across my eyelids. Don’t worry about me, though: I’ve become very
good at pretending I won’t spend the rest of my life searching behind soup cans in the drugstore
for a memory I’m forever convinced is just around the corner. And besides, everything’s still
exactly the same way we left it. The sky is the same hematoma purple as the bruises on my left
hip, a map to some obsolescent playground where we hung dizzy off the merry-go-round. For
weeks on end I wake up with sweat soaking the sheets, convinced you’ve been hibernating in the
back of my closet for the past twenty years. Sorry. I must have mistaken the clock ticking for a
heartbeat. Sorry. I must have mistaken our soft-in-the-middle bodies for those once-glittering
machines we dragged, laughing and stumbling, up up up to the top of that stadium even though
neither of us gave a shit about baseball. Burying my hand in the back of your faded t-shirt to
keep you from pitching down the stairs again while you waxed poetic about—what? What was it
again? Sorry. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but you must understand. Forgetting is an expensive
hobby. Retracing every step. Putting together a puzzle where every other piece is backwards or
worn out or gone entirely. Back to the rusty playground with my fingers tight around the chain
link fence—was it here where I begged you not to say it out loud or was that a dream? Did I
carry you home from that godforsaken stadium or did you carry me? When the phone rings, over
and over in the night, I’m sure that the call is coming from inside the house. Reverse fracture.
Glistening saliva on my bottom lip. I’m trying to get it together, I promise, but all I can think of
is that terrible summer, how our lives felt like they were finally going somewhere, like all those
years of spite were paying off with momentum. Pink noise. Heat exhaustion. Everything
distorted and backwards through a dirty mirror. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever been
more terrified in my life.